Tick tick tick- Kitchen Renovation - Day minus 2

Two different major events are in count-down mode around here: it is 6 days until the long-awaited Dakotas trip (more on that soon), and 2 days until a total kitchen renovation kicks off with full demolition commencing on Monday. The timing of the kitchen reno isn't great, as I will be away for the middle week of the three total weeks it is expected to take from start to finish. I would like to be here to see it all unfold, but Amp has promised to take daily pictures, and she has been the driving force behind this whole project and I know everything will go well.

Amp has been researching, designing and investigating various things since we made the decision to move ahead with this project several months ago. When we bought our house new 14 years ago, the builder's kitchen seemed alright. We upgraded the floor to a high end vinyl, the cabinets were mediocre but acceptable, and the countertops were a typical laminate. As the years have gone by, we have become less and less satisfied with the crappy cabinets, the floor is very worn, and the countertops should be something nicer. Every time we have considered upgrading something though, we keep coming back to the same problem - it's almost impossible to do just one item at a time.

The part of the kitchen that we like the least is the cabinets. The drawers are not the nice self-closing drawers that all good cabinets come standard with. The doors rattle. The laminate ends of the exposed runs have weathered and faded with time and light to an ugly purply-brown color. Now, I like the color purple as much as the next person, but it's not a great look for kitchen cabinets. The overall effect by now is that they just look and feel cheap. And I hate looking at them.

But the cabinets are the keystone part of a kitchen. We can't change the flooring if the footprint of the cabinets may change. And it makes no sense to put nice granite countertops on top of crappy base cabinets.  If you are going to replace the cabinets, then you have to change the flooring and the countertops.

So the cabinets are the single domino that has brought down our entire kitchen.

After a flurry of planning, ordering and buying, we are ready to begin. There is a dumpster in the street outside our house, and the contractor will be here at 7am sharp Monday morning to get started. I can't wait.